Gardening with Peat Moss Promotes Global Warming

Canadian Gardeners Can Finally Go 100% Peat-Free This Spring

TORONTO, ON – Peat moss and global warming go hand-in-hand. Many consumers visit local retailers each spring to purchase soil enriching products for their gardens and lawns. Unfortunately it is little-known that the main ingredient of these products, peat moss, is one of the worst choices consumers can make when trying to be environmentally conscious.

Peat moss promotes global warming and eco-system degradation. Peat is essentially “strip-mined” from drained peat bogs (most of which are located throughout vast tracts of land in Quebec and New Brunswick) and is simply an unsustainable product much like oil or coal.

What makes the use of peat moss unsustainable?

  • Peat Bogs are carbon sinks; the harvesting of peat moss releases CO2, promoting global warming.
  • Peat moss compromises ecological systems that filter 10% of the world’s fresh water.
  • Peat bogs are home to many important floral, fauna and animal species.
  • A typical peat extractor will take up to 22cm of peat per year; peat grows at a rate of 1mm/year.
  • The Royal Horticultural Society in the U.K. has mandated that 90% of its own growing media

    •       requirements be peat-free by 2010.

Peat Extractors in action releasing CO2 into the atmosphere and stripping away an ecosystem.

What is a viable alternative to using peat? Coconut coir!

PlantBest, an innovative Canadian company dedicated to producing a suite of high-performing, 100% sustainable gardening and outdoor products uses a material previously considered to be agricultural waste as the basis for their products. Coir (pronounced “koi-erâ€), is the spent rind of a coconut and can be refined to various degrees to produce a highly effective peat-moss replacement. Farmers in the Netherlands have been raving about the use of coir as a growing medium for decades. Coir is brown, light and soil-like and can be used for the same applications peat moss is used for. Among some of coir’s benefits are:
  • Coir works like thousands of mini natural sponges absorbing water and releasing it to plants as needed.
  • Coir retains more water than peat moss, significantly reducing watering requirements.
  • Coir is 100% organic.
  • Coir is pH neutral.

PlantBest also values a fair-trade business model, maintaining most purchasing and manufacturing activities in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam where it operates. The goal is to keep the majority of the economic value of PlantBest‘s activities in the hands of subsistence coconut farmers and the company’s Vietnamese employees.

Ultimately, PlantBest is helping a developing region reap the economic benefits of a previously wasted byproduct of the local coconut harvest transforming into a line of award-winning, eco-friendly garden and outdoor products.

The bottom line – PlantBest offers consumers a high-performing, high-value, 100% environmentally sustainable replacement for peat moss.

For more information and to view PlantBest‘s entire suite of products visit www.plantbest.com.
Contact Patsy Moss patsym@plantbest.com for more facts about PlantBest and pictures of products.  
Alternate Contact: Thijs Millenaar at 905-470-0724 x 359 or email: thijsm@plantbest.com

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